Use code SUMMERPRACTICE for a 25% discount on all On Demand Courses through August 31.

When did you stop breathing?

With Vimalasara Mason-John recorded on June 4, 2017.

Found our teachings useful? Help us continue our work and support your teachers with a donation. Here’s how.

We could say that the Buddha was teaching us to breath again. It’s said that the prince Siddhartha was sitting under a Bodhi tree, practicing the anapanasati (the mindfulness of breathing) when he gained enlightenment and became awake, a Buddha. He was aware of the whole experience of breathing. Through breathing he trained the mind to be sensitive to the body, rapture, pleasure, the mind, mental processes, impermanence, dispassion, cessation, relinquishment. And while breathing he learned to release the mind from suffering. In this session we explore turning towards experience with breathing.

Listen to the audio version below, or click here to download the mp3.

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • dale borglum

    The end of fear: conscious living, conscious dying.

    Until we are free there is a fundamental fear of the spaciousness that is our true nature. Can we become intimately familiar with the urge to run away from the love, the spaciousness, that is the essence of this moment? All fear is fear of death, fear based on our identification only with that which…

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    Trust in the Goodness of your Practice

    Basic goodness is the fundamental ground of your own heart and mind and being. A buoyant heart allows us to face the ‘infinite ocean of suffering’ and stay open-hearted; It is the foundation for living the Bodhisattva vows, it is how we keep on waking up and showing up and growing up, for the benefit…

    Read More

  • Love & Boundaries

    Our practice cultivates qualities of boundless love, whether through loving kindness practice, or opening to the love inherent in deep states of awareness. But can we really love everyone boundlessly? What about political leaders who may be causing tremendous suffering? Or when our boundaries get crossed in any way—personally, at work, in our families, or…

    Read More

  • Dave Smith

    I think I am…Understanding self and non-self, through the five aggregates

    One of the most puzzling and profound aspects of Dharma is the teaching of anatta; translated as non-self. For us living in the modern world, with the emergence of social media and the over emphasis and obsession with self, how can we use this teaching in a way that is constructive, authentic, relevant and realistic….

    Read More

  • Dave Smith

    Practicing metta vipassana

    In this talk Dave discusses the process of integrating heart practices within the four foundations of mindfulness. Mindfulness practice unites the steadiness of concentration with the immediacy of moment to moment experience. As we learn to collect the body and mind, intuitive wisdom arises. This allows us to open to the truth of each moment’s…

    Read More

  • Eugene Cash

    Not Clinging to Anything in the World

    These words, spoken by the Buddha in the Satipatthana Sutta, point us to the potential for awakening inherent in mindfulness practice. Even now, in the midst of the pandemic of Covid-19, we can explore what it means to live a life of love, commitment and authenticity as we discover the freedom of not clinging to…

    Read More

  • Sophie Boyer

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Sophie Boyer – Week of 18 May, 2026

    This week’s theme is: The Unfolding of Presence

    This week, Sophie Boyer invites us back to the heart of daily meditation: just practice. It’s a practice where no effort is needed to be present, for presence is already here. Let us simply return to it.

    Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.

    Read More